Monday, January 20, 2014

44's Losing Game

Game - a measure of smoooothness - may also be applied to diplopolititary endeavours - like 44's outreach to high five the Mullahs in Persia.Why cause?Because!!

There are two main reasons for this outreach. One is simply the desire of the president to extricate Great Satan from the Middle East. The other reason, arguably more important, is fear of Al Qaeda: 44 undoubtedly sees Iran and its Shiite allies as potential partners in the fight against Sunni jihadism.44's strategy is breathtakingly ambitious. It is also destined to fail.First, it ignores the obvious fact that, unlike China at the time of 37’s diplomacy in the 1970s, Iran does not share a common enemy that would force it to unite with America. Though Iran’s proxies are fighting Sunni extremists in a number of theaters, Iran itself has cooperated with Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists, such as Hamas and the Taliban, when it has served its interests to do so. Iran’s rulers simply do not regard Al Qaeda as an existential threat on a par with the “Great Satan”. By contrast, Mao did see the Soviet Union as a sufficient threat to justify an alliance with the “capitalist imperialists” in Washington.

The second major problem is that Iran has always harbored dreams of regional hegemony. There is no sign that the election of the “moderate” cleric Hassan Rouhani as president has changed anything.On the contrary, Iran is stepping up its support for militants in the region. There have been reports recently that Iran is smuggling sophisticated long-range missiles to Hezbollah via Syria and that it sent a ship, intercepted by the Bahraini authorities, loaded with armaments intended for Shiite opponents of the Sunni government in Bahrain.Iran under President Rouhani has done nothing to lessen its support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria either. It has, in fact, gone “all in,” sending large numbers of its own operatives and its Hezbollah allies, along with copious munitions, to help the regime stay in power.Iran’s power play is engendering a violent pushback from Sunnis increasingly radicalized in the process. This is the third and final problem that will doom 44’s outreach to Tehran.